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Tuesday, 18 September 2012

There's Always an Excuse for Prejudice, Erasure and Tropes

One
of the things we’ve found in our many reviews of the genre from a
social justice perspective is how many times people will make up various
excuses for the problems we talk about. There is no limit to the
different excuses people raise, but often it can feel like we’re
responding to the same script since we see the same points raised again
and again. Since, we assume, they are widely believed we’re going to
poke a few of these:The Protagonist doesn’t hate them because they’re a minority - it’s because they’re horrible people.This normally becomes an issue when we point out, for example, that a character has no female friends and strikes sparks with every woman around them.
Or the protagonist hates every single POC in the book/TV series. Or
that the only GBLT characters in a book have been the protagonist’s
enemies.Now
these protagonists rarely turn round and say “I hate women!” or “she’s
my enemy because she’s a lesbian, evil lesbian!” because most authors
aren’t that ridiculous. Usually, the protagonist does have a very
legitimate reason to hate these people. Yes, every woman they met was
mean to them. Yes, all the POC around them were cruel and rude. Yes,
that evil GBLT villain is indeed evil. There were big story reasons for
the character to hate all of these people. This is true.But
this a work of fiction, not a report of real people. The writer is an
author, not a journalist. The cruel POC, the evil GBLT villain, the
mean women - they don’t exist. They’re all creations of the author. And
if the author has created a book where all the women/POC/GBLT/etc are
set up to be awful and hateable then it is because the author chose
them to be so.If
the marginalised people in a series are all hateful people that the
protagonist loathes - for good in story reasons - then the author has
created that scenario. And, yes, that’s problematic.It’s just who they are! I see them as people not POC/GBLT/etcSo
you’ve written your story and it turns out you have a sexually
predatory GBLT person, or a loud, angry, sassy Black woman side-kick
(bonus points if she has magic to help the protagonist) or some equally
tired, stereotyped trope. Naturally we’re not impressed but the protest
is “they’re not a sassy, magical side-kick because they’re Black, it’s
just who they are!” In other words, you assert that their adherence to
an extremely tired trope is just coincidence.Now
it’s vaguely possible, I guess, that you are somehow packed into the
Mars Rover and are actually beaming you books or scripts from there and
your intended audience is actually aliens from the planet Zog. In which
case I applaud you for being able to write under such difficult
conditions and being our ambassador for the Zoggi with books about
vampires.